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Science had a very interesting special section this spring: The Science of Inequality – basically doing a summary and review of issues related to the stuff in Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century The section has a series of very interesting articles on a range of related topics: “Inequality in the Long Run” by…

Astrophotography is the title of a gorgeous and very useful new book by Thierry Legault I had to taper off doing book reviews, much to the annoyance of all those lovely people who persist in sending me just the sort of books that I actually really love to read – it just got too time…

There was an interesting article in the Chronicle a few weeks ago: The Soul of the Research University by Nicholas Lemann. Lemann provides a very interesting discussion of the contradiction between the academic ideal of the research university and the political perspective of the vocational school of further education, including some healthy historical perspective on…

A research group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has produced ultrastiff ultralowdensity metamaterials by 3D printing of microarchitected microlattices. This is very cool – they do additive 3D printing using microstereolithography with nanocoating and postprocessing and can make self-similar lattices with densities varying by several orders of magnitude in bulk density but near constant stiffness.…

Day two of the New Frontiers wrap-up conference. This is a slow liveblog with more cosmology and life in the universe. Yesterday’s summary is here A couple of years ago, the Templeton Foundation funded the New Frontiers program to pose “Big Questions” in some areas of science. This is a slow liveblog – part II…

A couple of years ago, the Templeton Foundation funded the New Frontiers program to pose “Big Questions” in some areas of science. This is a slow liveblog – part II will be tomorrow with more cosmology and life in the universe Seed funding was provided to 20 investigators and small groups to start exploratory research,…

Some people, with good cause, do not like the phrase “dark side of the Moon”. The reason they do not like it, is because of a common cognitive misconception. Historically, the phrase refers to the farside of the Moon, which for most of history humanity could not observe, at all, because the Moon is synchronously…

“There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it’s all dark.” While the Moon has a nearside and a farside, it does not, actually, have a dark side or a light side, now. At least not a fixed dark side, just a slowly moving night side, and day side. But it…

“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall on the Dark Side of the Moon…” The Astrowright has been doing some lunatic slow blogging on an interesting problem: from Ron Hodges – NASA medialibrary from apod One of these is not like the other… Jason discusses how we came to be thinking about these things in Part I:…